Innocents have been executed

Tuesday

May 29, 2012 at 12:01 AMMay 29, 2012 at 9:55 AM

If you're reading this in a comfortable, middle-class home, what happened to Carlos DeLuna almost certainly could never happen to you. But everyone should care about DeLuna's story because it lays bare America's broken "machinery of death," to quote former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.

If you’re reading this in a comfortable, middle-class home, what happened to Carlos DeLuna almost certainly could never happen to you.

But everyone should care about DeLuna’s story because it lays bare America’s broken “machinery of death,” to quote former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. After decades on the bench, Blackmun finally stopped upholding death sentences. He said the potential for error is too great in a system “fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.”

DeLuna was a poor Hispanic nobody with a criminal record who was executed in Texas for a crime he didn’t commit. The system in Texas does not go out of its way for people like DeLuna. He was put to death in 1989 for the 1983 knife slaying of Wanda Lopez at a convenience store where she worked in Corpus Christi.

When DeLuna was arrested a short time after the murder, there wasn’t even a microscopic drop of blood on his clothes or shoes, despite a crime scene where Lopez’s blood was splattered on walls and pooled on the floor. A man’s bloody footprint at the scene was never measured by detectives to find a match.

Had police, prosecutors or defense lawyers done their job, they would have uncovered evidence pointing to another man. Carlos Hernandez was a knife-toting violent felon who told multiple witnesses that he had committed the Lopez crime. Hernandez died in prison in 1999 of cirrhosis of the liver.

DeLuna’s case is back in the news because of the indefatigable detective work by Columbia Law School professor James Liebman and a team of students. They spent six years interviewing more than 100 witnesses and reviewing every piece of evidence. Now their findings are compiled in a book-length spring edition of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, titled “Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution.” (Available in full at www3.law.columbia.edu/hrlr/ltc) In Spanish, tocayo means namesake or twin. Hernandez joked that his “stupid tocayo” DeLuna was taking the fall for him. The two looked strikingly similar.

DeLuna was put to death by a fallible system. Whatever you might think of capital punishment, everyone should be at least on the side of never executing the innocent. DeLuna is but one example of justice gone wrong; the case of Cameron Todd Willingham is another. Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for an arson fire that killed his three children. An independent review indicated that the state relied upon faulty fire science to convict.

These kinds of cases should cause all of us to rethink this country’s prolific use of the death penalty. The punishment has been abolished throughout Europe, except in Belarus, and some Americans in blue states are finally losing their taste for it. Connecticut repealed its death penalty in April after Illinois did so last year. Only 33 states still have the death penalty. Californians will be voting on eliminating it in November.

Miscarriages of justice occur far more often than they are unearthed and recognized. A national registry of exonerations recently launched by the law schools at the University of Michigan and Northwestern lists more than 100 people who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.

In 2006, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that because mistaken convictions have been uncovered, America’s death penalty is justified. He declared with relish that the system of procedural safeguards actually works because no innocent person, “not one,” has been wrongfully put to death. If there has been, Scalia wrote, “we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.”

Excuse us, Justice Scalia, but here are two: Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham. These are two men whose stories should lead all of us to conclude, as Justice Blackmun did, that America’s death-penalty experiment has failed.

Robyn Blumner writes for Tribune Media Services.

blumner@sptimes.com

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